Clarence Snopes is introduced as a younger member of "a vast sprawling clan of a family or even tribe," the Snopeses of Frenchman's Bend (89). Faulkner's imagination returns to the Snopeses, in fascination and horror, from the beginning to the end of the Yoknapatawpha story. Although the individual Snopeses in the various fictions are often complex and even sympathetic, as a "tribe" they serve as the symbol of the modern, devolved South.